Many schools now use electronic scheduling systems for their parent teacher night bookings. While paper bookings by students are ‘simple’ to administer, there are significant costs to this approach both educationally and financially. Parents are increasingly interacting with schools electronically and parent teacher interview booking has been found to provide a very large degree of goodwill to the school. Parents who use an ‘efficient’ system to book their interviews electronically consider the school in a whole new light. They immediately equate the booking system technology to the ‘type’ of systems the school uses. Wouldn’t you like your child to be taught at a modern school, which uses modern technology? No amount of fancy sales speak in the enrolment brochure can make up for a parent physically interacting with the school’s own technology system, and finding it a positively rewarding experience.

There is much confusion and misunderstanding about many aspects of central scheduling of parent teacher interviews. Schools often assume there is little difference in the concepts of centralised scheduling compared to other methods – either paper based, or online booking to specific times.

What is often misunderstood is that the majority of benefits, of parents interacting on the web to schedule versus on paper forms, are in the most part related to the difference in the TYPE of scheduling, being centrally scheduled (at once by the school), as opposed to managed by end users, or in a sequential, individual and linear manner. Confused? To clarify further – parents get excited not about booking specific times online but about getting a better schedule. Let’s examine different types of scheduling methods.